SAO: Outside-In
by FidikVien
Summary: All over the world children, friends, husbands, wives are all being trapped in a virtual world with no clear way out. Enter the IT guys, hackers and others who will do whatever it takes to ensure a way out, and support the bodies of those stuck inside.
1. Prelude (Pilot)

Well here goes. I've had some positive feedback from my peers about this concept. A look at SAO from the other side of the coin, the people on the outside wanting to hack in, the people who had to witness their friends, siblings, husbands, wives all trapped in this world.

This chapter is intended to be a pilot, feedback from this will be the deciding factor if I continue this endeavor or not.

Love it or hate it, I appreciate the time taken to look over my work! Thank you!

* * *

7:30AM on a Monday, Christopher Motiva, a young college graduate of 24 this year, he looks over at his phone that's got its cheesy cheery alarm tone going off, silencing the alarm he sits up and turns on the TV, rubbing his eyes he stood up and looking outside his City apartment, a small city of Portland, Maine, He walks over to his door and sees the Wall Street Journal exactly where it was every morning, chucking it on the counter he starts his morning routine, shower, shave, coffee on, khaki pants and polo shirt proclaiming his position in the company he worked for "Systems Engineer", take coffee and out the door.

He takes his laptop bag and gets in his car and arrives at 8:45 at IDEXX Laboratories, walking in he's greeted by various members of his department, and he takes up his seat in his office. He logs into his computer and uses a script to launch his arsenal of utilities across the eight monitors in pairs of two in front of him. Looking over system log aggregators, network load reports, system log averages, countless emails, work orders, and his calendar. Outlook pops open a window "Meet with DevOps 12:00PM"

He didn't like it, he carries his laptop with him down to the developer's think tank. He never liked devs in the first place, Chris was much more at home with the nitty gritty systems, working with the cables, the machines and the brains that made what these sloppy coders made run. He sat in basically a beanbag and groaned as he opened his laptop and typed some emails as he listened passively into the talk that was being given. Some new virtual reality helmet, a thing for gamers "Oh great, more bandwidth hogging". He started listening in more when the talk shifted to how immersive this helmet was, it tapped into the nervous system to provide the ultimate level of realism. "What about bugs…. You really want to be that close to people's… brains really, in the wild" He said to the Man in jeans and a t-shirt talking, he could feel the eyes of the room upon him as he waited for his reply. "We've done plenty of testing Mr. Motiva, run it through debug logging and if you find a flaw in beta, let us know" He moved on and Chris did exactly that, opening up the DevOps server console and editing to put that program in debug logging and waited for the log file to appear as he listened in.

"This will go live this weekend, Chris, I need you to have the hardware ready to handle the load. I want everyone on full A-Game let's iron any last glitches out and let's light this candle!" The group of coders cheered and went to their work, Chris stayed behind and looked his logs over and looked to the man in t-shirt and blue jeans with a critical eye "Why don't I see any logout requests in this version?"


	2. Chapter 1: Lifeless Breath (FIXED!)

NOW WITHOUT ERRANT HTML!

Thank you very much for the positive feedback and as promised here is your first chapter. Probably still a little dry, but i'm enjoying setting the scenes, we will get into things more as time goes on. I will warn you, I am a college student, and thus timing of chapters will be based around that as my studies do take priority. Thanks again for reading!

* * *

"Well" The man stumbled briefly as he spoke "That request must just not be, be logged in the latest version, just have everything ready to roll for public release next Friday alright?" The blue jeaned man said as he exited the room.

Christopher sat motionless for a moment, pondering what he had just heard. Some 'Nervgear' contraption hijacked people's brains and gave them some fancy gaming experience, and his network would be the first to have the public experience it. He shook his head and closed his Panasonic Toughbook, taking it by its handle he headed down the maze of hallways to a large double doorway with "Data Center" printed on a small placard on the door, he shoved the key into to lock and opened the door.

The sound from inside the room was incredible, the roar of the HVAC units, the servers, switches and other appliances sucking in the cold air to keep their inner circuits from melting under their own heat. Chris walked to the new set if equipment racks that housed the node to this instance of the program.

This was a small node compared to the rest of the North American infrastructure to this project. Some of his best work he and his team put into this whole system. 50 racks of equipment all working harmoniously, breathing their lifeless breath to make the code, the 1s and 0s fly around and make this one system operate. He stared pondering, at the neatly cabled fiber switches 25 racks of just these, lights on each port indicated the flurry of activity over each of the network sockets. "People's lives" He said out loud in thought as he let one cable run though his hand, letting it flop back down under it's own weight.

He walks around to the other side where the hundreds of Dell PowerEdge servers hummed, each one with enough RAM and processor power it probably could find a cure for cancer he thought to himself. The rack of endless hard drives had small flickering lights as Christopher's masterfully optimized database was constantly written to and read from. Chris leaned against the far wall staring at his system, a thousand he's designed just like it, heck this whole room he designed and maintained, but this one system now more than ever meant so much more. There could be no fault of his, no lag, no downtime. He'd fired more than one person just for that one word, downtime, how he loathed that word. This wasn't just big commerce though, what would happen if someone connected to his system timed out. Do you wake up? Do you die? How can anyone know? He didn't intend to find out on any account of his or his team.

Chris walked out of the room with determination, this would be the best most optimized online gaming system anyone has ever thought of. All his nodes, Maine, New York, Washington DC, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Chicago, Colorado, Washington, California, Hawaii, and Alaska. Every single node of this system would be so fast, so stable, it would be a model for the future. He would see to it personally. He had two weeks.

Christopher walks into his office and sat down, picking up his phone "We're having a meeting at 1… make time this is important."


	3. Chapter 2: A bit concerned

Thank you for tuning in! I'm thankful for the new followers! As always feedback feeds the beast!

* * *

Christopher's team and he worked nonstop. Well nonstop is relative, between the hours of 9am and 5pm they worked non-stop with some at-home fiddling in between. It got the job done, everything was in Chris' liking for the release date which was that Saturday on Memorial Day weekend. People were lining up at shopping malls waiting for the midnight release of the first game and device that allowed for a 100% immersive experience, you're body literally became part of the game.

It was an overtime night for everyone, all the coders that worked on the project in all the facilities of IDEXX Labs, All the sysadmins, all the high brass of the company and their stakeholders were gathered in each facilities conference room for congratulations and to triage any immediate problems. In Portland Maine Christopher Motiva and his local team were sitting around the conference table, listening and smiling to the CEO of the company congratulating them and the army of developers for all their hard work in making this a reality.

"I really enjoyed working on this project, I know myself and my team as well as the DevOps team are really excited for tonight" Chris stood and addressed everyone in the room "As far as my department goes we've planned for a very high concentration of traffic tonight as people try out their hardware, they need to get home from the midnight release to plug it in first though, so we're assuming around 1AM is when we will see the most account creation traffic, then the game traffic will begin. I've gone ahead and closed off the database for logins at the moment and I believe the DevOps earlier today worked at making sure anyone left was forced to log out for any final work."

The man still in t-shirt and jeans in contrast to everyone else's formal attire spoke up "Yes that's exactly right, as we can see on the board here" The room's attention turned to the television screen on the back wall with graphs and charts displaying system utilization and a live log of activity. "there's only 1 user active and that's the GM's account from Japan, so he's been granted special permission to be in-game when other players join, as Mister Motiva said, we're all excited, we've worked long hours on our slice of the pie and are eager to see what happens"

What happens? Chris thought, what does that mean?

* * *

Hours passed, news reports on the wall showed reporters on scene at the midnight release and people pouring into the shopping centers, ravenously throwing credit cards and cash at the store clerks trying to be the first on this system, Chris shook his head, the news media had brought in a live feed to their conference room and the CEO and his executives were live counting down until the flood gates opened for login requests "Five…. Four…." Chris looked to his laptop and the screen filling with refused login attempts as the database rejected their attempts to bypass its administrator's barrier on use "Three… Two…." Chris hits enter on a command to his database he had ready "DB_LOCK=OFF" and the boards light up with users smashing onto the system, all creating accounts.

Chris kept a careful eye on his system, the load balancer doing its job, all smoothly routing people to various data centers to ensure even distribution of resources as well as a fast experience. He nodded as the time was coming for them to leave. 2:30 AM, he was tired the CEOs had already left, the DevOps were packing up and leaving "Alright guys, lets head home, keep your phones on just in case but let them have their fun" "alright, sounds good" Was the resounding reply from the other members of the team, all were yawning and stretching as they all walked out of the dark building and to their cars and started the drive home to catch a weekend's sleep. "Check it in the morning, more than I thought wow… games I guess" Chris said to himself as he drove it was rather surprising to him that he user count stayed relatively steady and didn't diminish as he assumed people would play for a little while and then go to bed, but he just assumed it must be because it's the weekend and their excited.

* * *

John Andrews, Police sergeant for the Portland Police department was sitting in his brand new Ford Explorer Police interceptor in a subway parking lot. Being the supervisor of the night shift this week he too this time to look over some reports and incoming incidents and see what his men for up to… a army of 10 tonight because of the holiday. He had 2 units keeping a presence at the shopping centers to make sure things didn't get out of hand, when everything settled down it was a normal night in the city, busy but not overly so. As he was in the middle of typing out a report to fraud complaint he got earlier his radio piped up with the voice of the dispatcher "403, and 421 I'll take you too"

The other officer piped up answering the call "403" Peter Hussey, new cadet but is going places. John keys up his radio "421" John had been on the force for over 15 years and loved his job and was on his way to becoming a Lieutenant before long. The dispatcher piped up again "Can you guys slide on over to the Tara Apartments…. Apartment 12B Bravo…. I have a female on the line she's concerned about her son, 17 year old male, he's put on the new gaming helmet that was released tonight and doesn't know why he isn't detaching from that… she'd like a welfare check and to speak with an officer… 421 I put you on this call the CAD is pulling this card since it's calling it a possible major medical issue, do you want me to start MEDCU yet or no"

With a single flip of a switch the vehicle lit up brilliantly with blue strobe lights enough to blind a man, and he started down the road quickly for that address. He keys up his radio "Negative, we'll check welfare first and advice"

John pondered the call to himself as he drove "Why not just pull it off the kid..." He shrugged and continued his driving to the assigned address prepared to do just that.


	4. Chapter 3: Escalating big big time

Sergeant Andrews wheeled into the apartment building's driveway, beating his backup to the scene he exited his car, walking into the building meeting the very anxious mother in the kitchen of their small apartment building.

"Oh Oh officer, he's in the other room here, he's been there for hours. I call to him and he won't answer, nothing!" The woman, said in a very concerned voice, quickly ushering the officer into her home and offering him a cup of coffee which he politely refused as he walked to the bedroom door.

"What was his name again Ma'am?"

"Justin"

The sergeant nodded to his partner as he entered the home, he remained outside to talk with the mother mainly to keep her occupied with something other than worrying about her son.

John walked into the bedroom "Justin. Justin! Wake up in there, police." He knocked on the helmet he was wearing.

"Can we pull it off'n him?" The other officer piped up from the door, standing next to the mother

"Go ahead try it" The mother said nodding to the sergeant who slowly pulled the helmet off the child.

* * *

The next series of events happened so quickly everything was a blur. As soon as the helmet was pulled off the child he started seizing, eyes rolling back in his head as his body shook all over. Peter moved the mother out of the way of the door and ran to his sergeant's side helping him hold the boy down "403 GET MEDCU DOWN HERE NOW, 17 YEAR OLD MALE, VIOLENT SEIZURE" he screamed into his radio.

* * *

The mother was sobbing on the couch in her small apartment living room, the EMT had just declared Justin Thompson dead at the age of 17, that contraption of a gaming helmet just killed a child, Sergeant Andrews was not happy, he was out in his car writing a scathing police report, this can't go unnoticed he thought, who knows who else has done the same thing.

* * *

Chris Motiva was being woken at 7am on a Saturday, this better be good. He looked over at his phone, one of his lead team members. "Jeeze you got some nerve calling me on a weekend" He said smiling, joking with his friend.

The voice on the other end of the line was not at all friendly though, serious and stoic "Have you seen the news?"

"No what?" Chris said, getting up and pulling the copy of the wall street Journal from his apartment hallway and opening it. The headline screamed 'CHILDREN KILLED BY GAME PLATFORM' "Woah…"

"Yeah this is crazy. We need to make some calls, this is escalating big big time."

"Yeah. Let's have a conference at 1400, ill send some emails" He hangs up the phone looking down at the newspaper again "Holy shit" He muttered to himself shaking his head.


End file.
